Welcome back to the third part of my short-series about emotion. If you have not read the the previous parts, I recommend you to read it first:
Part I : Introduction
Part II : The Evolution of Our Survival Instinct
You could still understand this post well without reading the first and second part, but I suggest to do for the sake of a better reading experience.
Last time we discussed about how our survival instinct developed and grew together with our emotion, connecting the dots between them. However, today I want to throw something that could break the web of our understanding on emotion: how different is emotion actually, compared to other intellectual aspects?
In psychology world, there are two important terms to describe and judge someone’s ability to process information and emotion: IQ and EQ. One tends to relate IQ or Intelligence Quotient to someone’s ability to learn, understand, and apply facts. This could be represented in how quickly one recognises patterns, connecting informations, and so on. On the other hand, EQ or Emotional Quotient is more related to perceive and express emotion through our senses. For years, this model works quite well to understand how our brain works, but I want to throw a counter argument to this model: are they actually that different?
Apart from the similarities and the difference of those two things, we may could agree to one certain thing: they come from our brain. We all know our brain develops through time. We evolved from less intellectual beings to species that could process a handful of complex informations at the same time, which is pretty cool, I guess? It is also important to underline the fact that we have the best all-rounder brain among other species, but may not be the best in a particular area. For example, chimpanzees are known to have a brilliant arithmetic ability, far more than the average human beings. When chimpanzees are trained, some of them show an outstanding performance in memorising numbers. If you are interested in the ability of animals in math, I could definitely recommend a book titled “Alex’s Adventure in Numberland”.
Evolution shows that there are a lot of factors that play in the process of our brain’s development, but there is definitely one factor that becomes the fundamental of the evolution theory itself: time. Time makes us a generally better human. Not a better person; a better human. This includes the quality of our brain. Moreover, we as a society seem to have a more complex categories to our personal preferences and feelings: on religious beliefs, sexual orientations, and so on. So, the question I want you to think before you continue to read this post is: “Do our emotions actually evolve with time, or do they actually arise because of the current social condition?” If you are not so clear, let me remind you about something I discussed on last post: about trust. Our advanced society rely on the collaboration of every human so much, which resulted a huge trust we put on other people unconsciously. However, this also result a social anxiety, a mental health issue that most of the global population have felt at least once in their life. We fear not to be able to succeed in the society, which creates a lot of pressure on us. Does this feeling of “afraid to fail in the society”, that could lead to more serious situations such as suicides, actually a “new” feeling that arise due to the pressure of the modern society, or does this feeling actually already stay behind our brain, just waiting for the trigger?
Suicide cases are generally interesting for me. Not in a personal way of course, ideally I want everyone to be able to get over their problem and find their motivation back to life. (If you are currently dealing with a serious mental health issue, please seek for a professional help. I want you to stay alive.) However, I want to talk more generally, about the fact that we actually even have thought to kill ourselves. As a living creature, this is fascinating. Living creatures who kill themselves. Let that sinks in.
Suicide is the most extreme way to fight our survival instinct. Fight might be not the best word to describe it, as I discussed in the previous post, suicide is an act of giving up. The survival instinct that fuels the efforts to stay a live just not enough to keep our motivation burning. Human beings are complex creatures, that somehow the evolution of our brain giving us access to this complex emotion. We don’t just feel a single emotion: happiness, sadness, or anger anymore. As I scroll through article about the “grouping” of our emotions, a lot of version comes up. This is one of my favourites:
Of course this may not be 100% accurate, but it might enable us to understand the mechanism of our feelings better. Suicide is not a feeling, it is a solution of a series of the feeling equations. Each person’s equation is different, but somehow unfortunately a lot of us come to that single solution.
One certain thing, this equation is so complex than any other species could process, and I could imagine the solution does not make any sense to an unevolved species. An animal that only cares for survival: eats and reproduces; I am pretty sure that could not wrap their head around the concept of suicide. Some species could understand some part of it though, as a self-defence mechanism, for example. However, what is so special about the suicide cases in human beings, is the primary goal of the action: death. For other common suicide cases in animals, death is the side-effect. Animals that appear to be depressed begin to exhibit self-destructive behaviour that sometimes ends in death, but this is not considered suicide, as the achieving of death was not necessarily the purpose or objective of the behaviour. (wikipedia.org)
Now let’s imagine that one of your closest friend is under a huge amount pressure, stressed, and could not think straight. He or she might have thought to commit suicide, since staying alive just makes the situation even worse. How would you react to them? How to understand someone’s emotion?
As I have said before, emotion is an upgraded self-defence mechanism, and with great power comes great responsibility. When we want to assess our physical strength, it is not so hard. One could maybe run, see how long does he/she take to run a certain distance. When we want to assess our ability in some knowledge, we take a test. When we want to test the particular health of our organ, some tests could be taken. But, how about emotion?
This question actually comes from someone else, she asked, “how could we know how weak someone is emotionally?” Sometimes when someone tells us his/her story, we tend to underestimate the situation. We might judge the person to be too weak, we think our burden is much bigger than theirs. But, how could we be sure? Feeling is something strongly connected to a particular person. There is a famous saying, “If you want to understand someone else’s situation, you have to put yourself in their seat.” For me, this does not help at all. This sentence actually gives no more advise than anything else.
“Put yourself in their seat” should mean that you have to learn more about that particular emotion someone’s feel and every events surrounding it, not just forgetting your own problem and focus on them. That is why we have to understand the mechanism of our emotion, which I will give my own take on this topic.
Firstly, emotion is not a real thing. “Not a real thing” implies that there is nothing more to it than a physical process in our body. The most famous one is endorphin, a chemical that releases by the body to relieve stress and pain. But, what makes the emotion special is the events surrounding it. At the same time, you and your friend might release the same amount of endorphins, but you might feel differently, why?
Emotions are based on memories, and memories are just a permutation of events throughout our life. The longer someone’s life is, the more combination are available to the string of events. The more common events you got with someone else, the more likely you feel the same way as them. We don’t remember emotions, we remember everything else around it. I want ask you, what is the happiest memory of your life? It might be when you got accepted to your dream school, or when you fell in love, anything. Do you actually remember the feeling, or do you remember the situation when you open the webpage and see green highlight that said you are accepted? Or when you he/she accepted your date?
Everyone that being accepted that day must be happy, but “the happiness” is different for each one of them. Even they are connected to a same event, there are more events that personally attached to every single person. The memories of learning for hours every night, skipping your favourite TV shows, and finally you got what you deserve. You don’t feel “the happiness”; the happiness is just a connection between everyone you experienced in the past. Every emotion has its own recipe, and the recipe is no other than the events that one’s had.
Beside physical events, our body could also contribute to certain emotions. Premenstrual syndrome and pregnancy might be the famous ones, but they are still physical events, just in microscopic level, in a three dimensional space and one dimension of time. In summary, emotions are just result from everything else happened since our existence to the present.
It seems that I am trying really hard to rationalise emotion so much, to the point that it could be replicable. Wait a minute, replicable? If emotions are just a string of events, maybe we could replicate it to a certain extent. Imagine this way, somehow I could download your memories and everything else in your brain, and fit it to an android. Then, I give you both a same trigger, would you both react the same way?
This is a fun thought experiment, and I want you to join in. Imagine a situation that someone might act differently and not so obvious, for example I ask you to go to a certain event. Maybe the person has a traumatic, happy, memorable experience about this particular event, but we don’t know. The only thing we know is the person and the android have the exact same memories, would they react similarly? This is kind of a Turing test, but for feelings. If this is true, we might be able to rationalise emotion.
What is so important in doing this? I have said before, that one of the goal to understand emotion is to help everyone else. If we could understand someone’s emotion better, then there is definitely a better chance to help them. We do not need to reach a perfect replication, a certain level of similarity might improves our understanding exponentially.
We are still struggling to understand ourselves collectively, that leads us to researches in psychology and neuroscience. However, this research area is so broad, and statistically it is so hard to see the improvement, compared to other scientific branches. However, our focus and approach has shifted from socially to scientific in the last years, we started to use brain imaging in our efforts to make sense of our own brain.
The goal does not change: help ourselves to master this upgraded self-defence mechanism. Because this mechanism is deeply attached to our own history, each one of us has the responsibility to learn and use it to our benefits. When we could make sense of ourselves, as a part of the growing society, it is already become our own awareness to help others. Maybe we grow together and master this unique skill in our own unique way.
Emotion is just a small but a history-changing aspect in our species. It has driven us to conquer challenges and leave footsteps in new places. It is the most personal thing someone could get, since the combinations are endless, compared to the number of people who live and have lived in the history. It what makes you special, and what you choose to do with it is what could leave your name in the history of humankind.
Image credit: infographic.tv
Part I : Introduction
Part II : The Evolution of Our Survival Instinct
You could still understand this post well without reading the first and second part, but I suggest to do for the sake of a better reading experience.
Last time we discussed about how our survival instinct developed and grew together with our emotion, connecting the dots between them. However, today I want to throw something that could break the web of our understanding on emotion: how different is emotion actually, compared to other intellectual aspects?
In psychology world, there are two important terms to describe and judge someone’s ability to process information and emotion: IQ and EQ. One tends to relate IQ or Intelligence Quotient to someone’s ability to learn, understand, and apply facts. This could be represented in how quickly one recognises patterns, connecting informations, and so on. On the other hand, EQ or Emotional Quotient is more related to perceive and express emotion through our senses. For years, this model works quite well to understand how our brain works, but I want to throw a counter argument to this model: are they actually that different?
Apart from the similarities and the difference of those two things, we may could agree to one certain thing: they come from our brain. We all know our brain develops through time. We evolved from less intellectual beings to species that could process a handful of complex informations at the same time, which is pretty cool, I guess? It is also important to underline the fact that we have the best all-rounder brain among other species, but may not be the best in a particular area. For example, chimpanzees are known to have a brilliant arithmetic ability, far more than the average human beings. When chimpanzees are trained, some of them show an outstanding performance in memorising numbers. If you are interested in the ability of animals in math, I could definitely recommend a book titled “Alex’s Adventure in Numberland”.
Suicide Shows The Advancement of Our Species
Suicide cases are generally interesting for me. Not in a personal way of course, ideally I want everyone to be able to get over their problem and find their motivation back to life. (If you are currently dealing with a serious mental health issue, please seek for a professional help. I want you to stay alive.) However, I want to talk more generally, about the fact that we actually even have thought to kill ourselves. As a living creature, this is fascinating. Living creatures who kill themselves. Let that sinks in.
Suicide is the most extreme way to fight our survival instinct. Fight might be not the best word to describe it, as I discussed in the previous post, suicide is an act of giving up. The survival instinct that fuels the efforts to stay a live just not enough to keep our motivation burning. Human beings are complex creatures, that somehow the evolution of our brain giving us access to this complex emotion. We don’t just feel a single emotion: happiness, sadness, or anger anymore. As I scroll through article about the “grouping” of our emotions, a lot of version comes up. This is one of my favourites:
Of course this may not be 100% accurate, but it might enable us to understand the mechanism of our feelings better. Suicide is not a feeling, it is a solution of a series of the feeling equations. Each person’s equation is different, but somehow unfortunately a lot of us come to that single solution.
One certain thing, this equation is so complex than any other species could process, and I could imagine the solution does not make any sense to an unevolved species. An animal that only cares for survival: eats and reproduces; I am pretty sure that could not wrap their head around the concept of suicide. Some species could understand some part of it though, as a self-defence mechanism, for example. However, what is so special about the suicide cases in human beings, is the primary goal of the action: death. For other common suicide cases in animals, death is the side-effect. Animals that appear to be depressed begin to exhibit self-destructive behaviour that sometimes ends in death, but this is not considered suicide, as the achieving of death was not necessarily the purpose or objective of the behaviour. (wikipedia.org)
How Predictable is Our Emotion?
Now let’s imagine that one of your closest friend is under a huge amount pressure, stressed, and could not think straight. He or she might have thought to commit suicide, since staying alive just makes the situation even worse. How would you react to them? How to understand someone’s emotion?
As I have said before, emotion is an upgraded self-defence mechanism, and with great power comes great responsibility. When we want to assess our physical strength, it is not so hard. One could maybe run, see how long does he/she take to run a certain distance. When we want to assess our ability in some knowledge, we take a test. When we want to test the particular health of our organ, some tests could be taken. But, how about emotion?
This question actually comes from someone else, she asked, “how could we know how weak someone is emotionally?” Sometimes when someone tells us his/her story, we tend to underestimate the situation. We might judge the person to be too weak, we think our burden is much bigger than theirs. But, how could we be sure? Feeling is something strongly connected to a particular person. There is a famous saying, “If you want to understand someone else’s situation, you have to put yourself in their seat.” For me, this does not help at all. This sentence actually gives no more advise than anything else.
“Put yourself in their seat” should mean that you have to learn more about that particular emotion someone’s feel and every events surrounding it, not just forgetting your own problem and focus on them. That is why we have to understand the mechanism of our emotion, which I will give my own take on this topic.
Firstly, emotion is not a real thing. “Not a real thing” implies that there is nothing more to it than a physical process in our body. The most famous one is endorphin, a chemical that releases by the body to relieve stress and pain. But, what makes the emotion special is the events surrounding it. At the same time, you and your friend might release the same amount of endorphins, but you might feel differently, why?
Emotions are based on memories, and memories are just a permutation of events throughout our life. The longer someone’s life is, the more combination are available to the string of events. The more common events you got with someone else, the more likely you feel the same way as them. We don’t remember emotions, we remember everything else around it. I want ask you, what is the happiest memory of your life? It might be when you got accepted to your dream school, or when you fell in love, anything. Do you actually remember the feeling, or do you remember the situation when you open the webpage and see green highlight that said you are accepted? Or when you he/she accepted your date?
Everyone that being accepted that day must be happy, but “the happiness” is different for each one of them. Even they are connected to a same event, there are more events that personally attached to every single person. The memories of learning for hours every night, skipping your favourite TV shows, and finally you got what you deserve. You don’t feel “the happiness”; the happiness is just a connection between everyone you experienced in the past. Every emotion has its own recipe, and the recipe is no other than the events that one’s had.
Beside physical events, our body could also contribute to certain emotions. Premenstrual syndrome and pregnancy might be the famous ones, but they are still physical events, just in microscopic level, in a three dimensional space and one dimension of time. In summary, emotions are just result from everything else happened since our existence to the present.
Artificial Intelligence…maybe Artificial Emotion?
It seems that I am trying really hard to rationalise emotion so much, to the point that it could be replicable. Wait a minute, replicable? If emotions are just a string of events, maybe we could replicate it to a certain extent. Imagine this way, somehow I could download your memories and everything else in your brain, and fit it to an android. Then, I give you both a same trigger, would you both react the same way?
This is a fun thought experiment, and I want you to join in. Imagine a situation that someone might act differently and not so obvious, for example I ask you to go to a certain event. Maybe the person has a traumatic, happy, memorable experience about this particular event, but we don’t know. The only thing we know is the person and the android have the exact same memories, would they react similarly? This is kind of a Turing test, but for feelings. If this is true, we might be able to rationalise emotion.
What is so important in doing this? I have said before, that one of the goal to understand emotion is to help everyone else. If we could understand someone’s emotion better, then there is definitely a better chance to help them. We do not need to reach a perfect replication, a certain level of similarity might improves our understanding exponentially.
Mastering This Special Skill
The goal does not change: help ourselves to master this upgraded self-defence mechanism. Because this mechanism is deeply attached to our own history, each one of us has the responsibility to learn and use it to our benefits. When we could make sense of ourselves, as a part of the growing society, it is already become our own awareness to help others. Maybe we grow together and master this unique skill in our own unique way.
Emotion is just a small but a history-changing aspect in our species. It has driven us to conquer challenges and leave footsteps in new places. It is the most personal thing someone could get, since the combinations are endless, compared to the number of people who live and have lived in the history. It what makes you special, and what you choose to do with it is what could leave your name in the history of humankind.
Image credit: infographic.tv
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